Dr Alex Baratta

Biography

Please feel free to contact me to discuss ideas for supervision or to discuss joint research.

Taking my Research on the Road

For more than ten years, I have hosted visiting schoolchildren, as well as visiting schools, in order to give talks regarding accent and identity, to include the implications for regional accents in the workplace. I also give talks to public organisations (e.g. the ArcSpace organisation in Hulme), as well as the public themselves (e.g. as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science, 2016). Please feel free to contact me should you wish me to visit your organisation to provide a talk on accent and the workplace, in order to provide information on the ways in which accent preference - and prejudice - is still a live issue.

Educational Background

AA in Music - Los Angeles Valley College

TESOL certificate - Canadian Global TESOL Training Institute

BA in English Literature - California State University, Northridge

MA in English Composition and Rhetoric - California State University, Northridge

MA in Linguistics - The University of Manchester

PhD in English - The University of Manchester

Teaching

Language Acquisition

Language, Education and Society

Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication

Reading and Writing Processes

PhD Supervision

I would be happy to supervise PhD students with interests in the following broad areas:

Accent/dialect/language and identity

Intercultural communication

Writer stance and writer identity

Further information

Besides my academic interests, I also enjoy creative writing:

Fiction

• Heat, My Boogeyman, Clockwork, The Last Days of Eden, The Baby, The Last Wish of Elliot Pomroy and The Cuckold are published at http://www.mybooklive.com/search.asp - please be patient while the folks at this site get the site back online (I hope!) Or, you can read the stories here: http://www.charliefish.co.uk/sortbyauthor.html

My interests also include movies and music, having written a 007 theme song entitled 'The Man Everybody Wants', which Desmond 'Q' Llewelyn said was 'very much in the Bond tradition' and Bond authors Philip Lisa and Lee Pfeiffer (The Incredible World of 007) said the song had 'good potential' and was 'definitely in the style of the early Bond songs'.The song's music video has been performed at several Bond conventions in the US and UK, to include locations such as New Orleans, London and Long Beach, California. The song is also included in the John Cork collection housed at the University of Southern California archives, with Cork a member of the Ian Fleming Foundation.

In addition, my tribute song to Peter Sellers, 'Dear Mr. Sellers', was described by Sellers' biographer Ed Sikov as 'very accurate...touching and sweet-tempered' and by Burt 'Cato' Kwouk as 'very nice'. The song has also been adopted by the Peter Sellers Appreciation Society.  My interview with the Peter Sellers Appreciation Society was published in the September 2002 issue of the magazine at www.petersellersappreciationsociety.com.

The music videos for both songs can be found at the following link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT2-0WGsV5U

Musicals

Details at http://www.doollee.com & www.americanmusicals.com

• Love from Above - performed in 1991 and 1998 at the Mayflower Club in North Hollywood, California (http://mayflowerclub.com/)
• Between Two Wars
• Only in LA

Media Coverage on Accent and Identity

From 2014-2017, I was interviewed by more than 40 radio stations (e.g. BBC Merseyside, BBC Manchester, BBC Cumbria, BBC West Midlands, BBC Ulster); I appeared in foreign media (Canada, Ireland, Italy, South Korea and Finland); I was featured in more than 30 newspapers/news websites; and I was interviewed on TV: BBC Northwest Tonight (July 8th, 2014), Russia Today (RT) in both 2014 and 2015; BBC Breakfast (May 13th, 2016); and Sky News TV (February 22nd, 2018). Please go to the media contributions and coverage section of my website to find a very brief sample of some of my media exposure. Or, go to www.accentpride.co.uk to find a full(ish) list of my media contributions over the past years. With the release of my book on April 5th 2018, I was interviewed by BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 5, BBC Manchester, BBC Radio Newcastle, BBC Radio Kent and BBC Radio Derby.

Here is a link to my BBC 5 radio interview in April 2018: https://twitter.com/bbc5live/status/982284695080656896

On November 23rd 2018, I was interviewed twice by BBC Radio Kent, discussing my previous media comment (Metro, April 5th 2018) that 'old linguistic habits die hard in the UK'. 

Below is a link to my interview with BBC Radio Five on May 7th 2019:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3zg51jqSv7d2PFvs44qBsyJ/have-you-ever-changed-your-accent-to-fit-in

Keynote Speaker

I presented a talk as an invited keynote speaker at the University of Sheffield's Linguistic Prejudice conference from July 9th - July 10th 2018:

• I presented my paper at the Variation and Language Processing conference at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, from January 23 - January 25 2019. The paper focuses on the linguistic processing of accents in Educational contexts, adopting a psycholinguistic-sociolinguistic hybrid approach.
• I presented my paper at the RELC conference, held in Singapore from March 11 - March 13 2019. My paper focuses on the content of my third book, which explains how non-inner circle Englishes (e.g. Indian English) can be used to teach the inner circle standard.
• My paper on military impoliteness has been accepted for the The 12th International Conference on (Im)politeness, to be held at Anglia Ruskin University, July 17 - 19 2019.

New Book

My third book, World Englishes in English Language Teaching, was published in 2019 with Palgrave Macmillan. A link to the book is here: https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783030132859